‘A Huge Mess’: Members of Both Parties Bewildered At Running Up to Federal Shutdown
Calls for compromise go unheeded in the House of Representatives
Democrats and Republicans alike appear to be astonished at how Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow House Republicans have led the nation to the brink of a federal government shutdown.
Working with one of the tiniest margins in US history, McCarthy has thrown his lot in with the most extreme elements of his own party, and therefore work on approving must-pass spending bills has essentially come to a standstill in the House.
Senators of both parties, meanwhile, quickly developed their own short-term gap-filling legislation called a continuing resolution or “CR,” designed to offer lawmakers more time for a long-term solution but it's not clear that that bill has any hopes in the much more far-right House.
Without passing any type of legislation otherwise, the federal government is set to shut down Saturday.
“Now Speaker McCarthy wants to move a partisan CR that has no chance of becoming law. Why? They're trying to help the country or is he simply trying to appease the 30 most extreme members of his caucus? Because the same MAGA Republicans that the speaker seeks to satisfy, the same members who seem happy to shut down the government, have already rejected his plan to avoid one,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). “ This is not an impossible puzzle to solve. The solution remains clear. Speaker McCarthy needs to stop letting the MAGA radicals drive his decisions and do the obvious and sensible thing: follow the Senate’s lead and pass a bipartisan CR to prevent this reckless shutdown.
“We hope he will come to his senses and emulate what we’re doing. Bipartisan, bipartisan, bipartisan — it’s the only way, the only way to avoid a shutdown. If MAGA Republicans get their way, the dangers for this country will be great,” he added. “Extremism will dominate, the ultra-wealthy will be empowered, working families will suffer, and women’s health care will be even more curtailed. We in the Senate don’t want to go down that troubling road. The speaker should resist the 30 or so Republicans who want to drag us in that direction, and he can do it by giving bipartisanship a chance, just as we are doing in the Senate.”
Republicans were barely less angry over the prospect of the first federal shutdown in some five years.
“Well, you know, for over 200 years, the Senate and the House have been very different. What we’re focusing on here in the Senate is to try to keep the government open and try to continue to pay the people who are central to our security, like air traffic controllers, Border Patrol, Capitol Police, because the Constitution requires that we continue to be paid during the shutdown,” said Schumer's counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky). “It’s completely unfair to the American people.
“So, look, I don’t want to give the speaker any advice about how to run a House, particularly through you, and we’re gonna concentrate on trying to do our job here in the Senate,” McConnell added.
Even some rank-and-file Republicans in the House were upset, such as Rep Nancy Mace, of South Carolina.
“You know, this is a huge mess. Here we are at midnight, the night before an exam, and we just started to study. There’s really no need for this to happen the way that it went down,” she said. “I have been frustrated by the process. I thought we would be better than this. And here we are scrambling and no one knows what's next.”
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